Voice quality on an Internet protocol (IP) telephony network suffers if audio content exceeds the bandwidth of the network. Admission control is used to preallocate bandwidth on the network to ensure that voice quality is maintained. In a conventional preallocation system, a call that would cause the available resources to be exceeded is not allowed.
A distributed call center application may simultaneously offer a call to multiple agents or endpoints. In a simultaneous hunt group, only one endpoint will eventually receive the call. Conventional systems preallocate resources for all the endpoints, thereby inflating the actual use of the network. In a typical system that uses preallocation of resources, an inflated network can cause erroneous call denial because additional resources are unavailable for additional calls.
Additionally, because conventional systems preallocate resources for each of the multiple endpoints within the simultaneous hunt group, the resources required to implement the simultaneous hunt group is proportional to the number of endpoints in the group. Depending on network resources or topology, therefore, it may not be possible to have a simultaneous hunt group that includes a large number of endpoints.
What is therefore needed is a system and method for allocating resources for a simultaneous hunt group that does not over-allocate resources or cause erroneous call denial. What is further needed is a system and method in which the resources required for implementing a simultaneous hunt group are independent of the number of endpoints included in the simultaneous hunt group.